Harvard University always ranks as one of the best colleges in the US, but returns on the august institution’s $32 billion tax-sheltered endowment fund came in dead last among the Ivy Leaguers for the latest five-year period.

With an annualized 1.7 percent return, it is no wonder Jane Mendillo, the head of Harvard Management Co., is stepping down by year’s end. Columbia University ran the tables, coming in first with an annualized five-year return of 6.8 percent.

Now admittedly, Mendillo — who lasted longer at Harvard than her predecessor Mohamed El-Erian lasted at Pimco — knew Harvard isn’t the kind of place where failing grades are accepted or embraced.

Just after Mendillo took over, the fund suffered gigantic losses — during the tumultuous 2008-2009 period, the endowment tumbled 27 percent, in part due to El-Erian’s complicated leveraged derivative and emerging market bets.

Fair enough; attempting to unwind and reconstruct a sinking $32 billion Titanic takes time. But despite multimillion-dollar pay packages and purebred pedigrees, the average Ivy League endowment still underperformed the US hedge funds it tries so hard to imitate, returning only 3.87 percent compared with the funds, which returned 9.15 percent on average over the past five years.

One thing is for sure: While our nation’s colleges and universities like to claim they are all about education and higher learning, that isn’t really the case.

They more resemble wannabe globe-trotting, macro money-management shops, and are really all about the dough. The US has $450 billion in college endowment funds.

There’s a simpler, more comprehensive fix for the corrupt cost-of-college scam that currently exists.

Simply require 50 percent to 75 percent of money raised by a school each year to go toward reducing tuition in order to keep its tax-free status.

As the donor gets a tax deduction, and the colleges and universities get to increase their investments tax free, shouldn’t the larger discussion in Washington really be about enacting bona-fide ways to reduce the obscene and corrupt actual cost of a college education, not solely the rate of interest on artificially inflated prices?